Women’s Hockey Team Breaks Into the New York Market

Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out about New York’s newest professional sports team, which is scheduled to play its first game at UBS Arena at Belmont Park on Long Island tonight. We’ll also check on the state of two states, New York and New Jersey.

Billie Jean King dropped the puck to start the first game of New York’s newest professional sports team, but it was an away game in Toronto. Bryan Trottier, the Hall of Famer who played for the New York Islanders in the 1980s, will drop the puck when the team plays its first game at UBS Arena at Belmont Park tonight.

Those are famous names, but the team itself does not have a catchy name the way the Rangers and the Islanders do. It is “P.W.H.L. New York,” one of six teams in the new Professional Women’s Hockey League. So far, New York is 1-1 after splitting the first two games of the season with Toronto.

P.W.H.L. New York played the second game at the team’s other home, the Total Mortgage Arena in Bridgeport, Conn. Our colleague Hailey Salvian of The Athletic, who has covered the nascent league, noted that the attendance was 2,152, the lowest of any P.W.H.L. game so far, a fraction of the biggest P.W.H.L. crowd to date, 13,316 at the Minnesota-Montreal game on Jan. 6.

Breaking into the New York market is a challenge for any newcomer, and UBS Arena, on the Long Island side of the Queens-Nassau border, is as close to New York City as the New York team will get.